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OpenBorough: active citizenship via e-participation

Amsterdam, Netherlands

The City of Amsterdam has embarked on a project to make democracy more dynamic and interactive by developing a digital participatory platform to engage with residents.

The OpenBorough project was established in Amsterdam-West to trial the use of digital tools together with offline interactions to enable more collaborative engagement between the council and citizens. OpenBorough aims to encourage citizens to share their ideas, vote or undertake action and mobilise their creativity and knowledge. The project also intends to provide public servants with the opportunity to become more skilled with new working processes and methodologies.

Background and objectives

Amsterdam-West is a borough of Amsterdam, to the west of the city centre. According to 2013 census data, it is the most densely populated borough of Amsterdam with 138,500 inhabitants, approximately 16,000 per km2.

In 2014, district councils were abolished and replaced by smaller, but still directly elected district committees. Responsibilities delegated to the 2014-2018 district committees include parks and recreation, streets and squares, refuse collection, permits and events, preparation of zoning plans, passports and drivers licenses, and welfare work.

This political change convinced the Amsterdam City Council, already interested in finding more open ways of working with citizens, to consider how it might apply the sharing economy’s principles and technologies to bring greater transparency and flexibility to its own participation processes.

Through the engagement of more residents in the consultation processes, the OpenBorough project aims to improve the legitimacy of council actions and to generate evidence of political engagement and the cost-effectiveness of participatory democracy so that it becomes policy across all borough’s in Amsterdam.

Implementation

The project is managed by a small innovation team that council staff who are looking to actively involve citizens in their projects can consult with. The team begins by analysing the specific needs and motivations of the citizens involved and then translates these into the design of digital participation tools. The idea is that through an iterative process, OpenBorough trails with stand-alone functionalities and simple prototypes will gradually build the city’s e-participatory capabilities. The innovation team is then in charge of sharing learnings between boroughs.

The first trial was the redesign of the interior of a cyclists’ tunnel. Rather than asking one or two artists for design proposals as had previously happened, the council opened up the design challenge to all residents and created a tool for uploading and voting for designs.

Simultaneously, an offline campaign was created to help less digitally-able residents to enter their proposals. Knowledge gained through this project directly influenced the next: the redevelopment of a residential square. As with the tunnel, the project was promoted through flyers, offline meetings, a banner at the square itself and an online discussion forum.

Financing and resources

The OpenBorough pilot project received a budget allocation of €225,000.

Results and impacts

The redevelopment of the cyclist tunnel received 49 designs from citizens aged 9 to 60, 6,125 votes were received and the tool was downloaded by 12,629 unique visitors. The online participation process moblized many more citizens than anticipated while traditional consultations had a far lower response.

For the redevelopment of the residential square, a digital forum enabled the 150 directly-affected households to upload ideas for the square. Residents could then post statements for and against these ideas. The most popular ideas were then transferred for implementation to the project leader responsible for redesigning the square.

In 2015 Amsterdam was named Europe’s first ‘Sharing City’ by ShareNL, the Dutch network for the collaborative economy. This award recognised the city’s open-minded approach to new, cooperative business models.

Lessons learned and transferability

Both trials were deemed successful due to the levels of participation. The council is confident that e-participation benefits all citizens and plans to continuously refine and embed the process. OpenBorough is planning more small- scale trials involving different aspects of local consultation and the up-scaling of existing participation platforms created for specific projects.